Cop Says Ex-husband Confessed To Slaying

June 23, 1993|By Terry Wilson.

As Raymond Hammerli rode with police from Downstate Champaign, where he had been arrested and charged with killing his ex-wife, to his hometown of Mt. Prospect, he gave officers a statement about the murder, police said.

"I killed Diane Hammerli on Feb. 14, 1990, afternoon," said the statement, written in Hammerli's hand and signed by the three officers who were present, Mt. Prospect police Detective Robert Rzepecki testified.

He testified for prosecutors in the second day of Hammerli's trial on charges that he beat and strangled his ex-wife, Diane Hammerli, 29, in the bathroom of the home they had just sold at 801 S. Emerson St.

Assistant Cook County State's Attys. Thomas Epach and Bill O'Brien have told Judge James Flannery Jr. that Hammerli, 36, killed his ex-wife two weeks after their divorce became final because she had a new boyfriend and was getting on with her life.

But Hammerli's defense attorney, Richard Kling, maintains that Hammerli was insane at the time of the killing and had suffered from mental illness before the slaying.

At this phase of the trial, prosecutors are trying to prove that Hammerli had planned to kill his ex-wife and that no one noticed aberrant behavior from him in the days before it occurred.

They have called bank tellers who gave Hammerli large sums of cash from accounts. They testified that he looked and acted like an average customer when they saw him.

Rzepecki said that Hammerli's car was found in Amarillo, Tex., and that a trace of telephone calls to the dealership that was repairing the car revealed that Hammerli was at a Day's Inn motel in Champaign.

Hammerli was arrested at the motel on March 22, 1990. Police found $57,567 in cash Hammerli had taken from bank accounts stowed in the trunk of a car the Amarillo car dealership had lent him, Rzepecki said.

About three-fourths of the way back to Mt. Prospect, Rzepecki testified that Hammerli asked the officers, with whom he had been talking, to stop the car. He gave them a statement and was cooperative until shortly after they arrived at his hometown Police Department, Rzepecki said.

Then, "I heard Sgt. Gibson yell `Ray' and I saw Ray Hammerli at the north exit of the booking area," Rzepecki said. "Seconds later the door flung open and he exited the building. He was headed in a northeast direction across the parking lot."

Rzepecki and another officer caught Hammerli and returned him to the Police Department.